Chapter 5 and Extra Battles Planning/Ideas

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For those of you who have ideas for battles in FFT but don't have the time/dedication to work on a full mod, I need your help! Also if you've ever played MT and thought to yourself "this combination of abilities/enemies will be interesting/nasty/etc" but haven't see it yet, let me know! I need ideas for enemies, formations, new abilities that lend themselves to interesting battles...

Extra battles have 23 slots left, these can be of any difficulty level. Easier ones can unlock as soon as after Mandalia 2.

Chapter 5 has 49 event slots left (about 24 battles). Difficulty must be consistent with the game's difficulty curve (9-10 on my scale for ch 5, or between the ch 4 and dd average).

The kind of thing I'm looking for here is less "generic hard shit" and more clever enemy/formation setups. Non-boss enemies should follow similar rules to the rest of the enemies of the mod (no true blanket immunities, pseudo-blanket immunities caused by 0 faith or abilities only, stat distributions of HP/MP/PA/MA/Speed/damage reduction similar to other enemies, etc). The kinds of things I'm looking for with clever enemy setups: innate ability synergy (such as Poison Heal + Marvel Scale), enemies with some kind of theme/role to them (offensive status setter, healer, etc), built in strategies (Berserk + Hamedo). For formations, things with synergy to the map (Poison Heal + the swamp, Arc ranged skills + a large hill, etc), enemies with synergy to each other (Haste + Sunlight on separate enemies), etc.

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I have an idea for one. Mounted combat enemies. That way you can have 2 forms of enemies that all attack you, and even if you got some super AoE nuke that could hypothetically do the entire lot in, you'd have to be able to pull it off twice in rapid succession for it to work.

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For years I’ve told myself that I want to make an FFT mod but it’s such a big undertaking and I’m not much for the technical stuff like ASM, so I just have fun playing them!I brainstormed a few ideas for you.Feel free to use all, part or none of them as you see fit.It’s easy enough for me to throw ideas out there but you have to worry about balancing your mod on the whole.

New Ch. 5 enemy

Spoiler

Living Mana

Speed – 6

MP – High

PA – Low / MA – High

Phys Reduction – 20% / Mag reduction – 80%

Phys evade – Low / Mag evade – High

Absorb Earth / Weak Dark

Innate Rasp

R/S/M abilities – Trump Card, Hollow Mind, Amplify, (NEW Mana Surge)

Mana Surge – Upon death deals damage equal to remaining MP to attacker.

Manastorm – Deal HP damage = to Percentage of missing mana, similar to I think it’s Neutron Star that Tiamats deal damage = to percentage of their missing HP. Maybe giving it a small mana cost so MP can’t be 0 and do 100%?

So my thinking on this guy is if you kill him quickly you’ll be having to deal with Mana Surge.If you leave him too long with Rasp and amplify draining his MP then Trump Card and Hollow Mind giving him extra attacks will be trouble.Hollow mind giving 2 mana storms could be pretty lethal.Flood Ball to use when MP is out.Silence is a status I don’t use a lot of so leaving him vulnerable to that thinking it could be useful on him.As I’m not much for the technical stuff I’m not sure if the new abilities are possible to code?

Are you looking to add new items?

Spoiler

I’ve always liked items in games that are powerful but have serious drawbacks.You can play with the numbers of course.

Soul Stealer –

Sword, Dark Elemental, PA +2, Absorb Dark, Strengthen Dark, Innate Analytic or Sheer Fforce, Drains HP, Initial Death Sentence. Would be a strong sword but you’re going to die if you use it.Possible proc if wanted would be Life Drink or Death sentence.

Needs to be pretty strong to make up for needing to be cured of the petrify and your CT not starting until your cured.

Random thought

Spoiler

Is it possible to let the player equip some items on monsters or can they only be force equipped for enemies in battles.Just thinking it would add some further customization if each monster was able to equip one type of item.Hats for birds, knives for goblins, etc.

That’s enough of a wall of text for now.I’ll try and think up a new battle formation on the weekend.I have a few ideas.

Edited June 2, 2017 by Taylor_778

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Some of these ideas can't be done, or won't work exactly how you're thinking. However, thank you for the ideas.

Innate Rasp on something might be kinda tricky if most of their set uses MP. As in, it would be too easy to stall them out and then use reaction abilities to deal with them if they're not given Boomburst or a similar attack. However if they just have a Rasp vulnerability, mid-level MP (around 800 max at lv 99), and a bunch of ways for the ai to rid itself of its mp (amplify, mana bomb, etc) that idea would be a bit more workable.

Items are currently filled out but I can always sacrifice a useless item for a new one. Max bonus of anything that I can give it is 255 though, or 0xff in hex (thank you 20 year old technology!).

Trust me, if I found a solution for playable monsters getting items yet, I would have allowed for it a long time ago. The reason that monsters currently can't equip anything is dozens of superfluous checks throughout the code. For example, the code will do a "check if unit is a monster" and then on the next few lines "check if item is equipped to unit". Why exactly would the first check even be needed if the monster class can't equip items naturally? I found over a dozen of these checks in documented code, disabled them, and it was still not enough to allow for monsters to equip items, which means there's more hiding in undocumented code.

Monsters in battle that have items is done with a workaround. They are all humans with a monster sprite. Every ability that is not learned by the player (human classes) in any way has 0 jp cost and 100% learn rate, and several of the skillsets themselves are considered auto learn.

The kinds of things I'm mainly looking for with battle formations is combinations of enemies that might be interesting. Think of ways that enemies can support each other or cover for each other's weaknesses. Minor spoilers:

In many of my formations, I've paired physically defensive with magically defensive enemies (such as Poeskas Lake and Fovoham 1 ch 5), or physically offensive with magically offensive enemies (Wiegraf ch 3, South Wall, etc). Several other battles are more thematic in that they match similar enemies together in terms of offenses/defenses (Zeltennia 1, Balk 1, etc) or functionality (Goland Coal City, Goug 1, which have matching elemental resistances). Sometimes there's a mapwide gimmick/theme (Izlude, DD Bridge). Overall though, I've limited the amounts of formations that feel like there's nothing going on interesting about them, which I call "generic hard shit," as compared with battles where there's something memorable about them that separates them from other ones I've made.

With superbosses, similar ideas of ability/moveset synergy takes place, even though just one op enemy is being designed vs. a formation of multiple less strong enemies. For example, Arcane Quickening + high physical reduction + Ignite; or innate Critical + Critical Quick + Comet + CT Burst. Bosses that appear with teams and multi-boss fights are designed a bit differently as well. But overall the main things that are avoided are single enemies that take too long to kill vs. how long it takes the player to mitigate what the enemy does to them, things that are boring to deal with or overly reliant on perfect RNG (HP Restore or innate regen on a ??? unit), or things that have absolutely no disadvantages at all (imagine something with the hp/defense/offense distribution of the steel giants, blanket immunities, with 10+ speed and isn't a boss? yeah no thanks...)

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Ah, that sucks. Would be nice to get some more use out of all the items in the game with the monsters using some too. Damn technology! Here's a couple battle ideas you could look at if wanted.

Spoiler

How about 4 Giants with 0 faith and Angel rings supported by 2 goblins with Cursed Rings and 2 Dragoons for limited wish.
Goblins could have speed save or move speed up. One could have a Jade Armlet in it's head or armor slot to mess with petrifying it.
My thinking would be the player would have to deal with lots of Aftermaths or work to use some statuses.

I threw together a couple set ups for the dragoons. Not sure if you want to give them some of the rare items I did.

An offensive unit. If some of the landscape could have lightning elemental the Geomancy could also be used to heal the giants.

A Thematic extra battle could be called All the Kings Men and be a Mad King with a bunch of squires. If you can pick names for the squires you could have some
fun with giving them names and skills accordingly. One named Cook could have a butter knife. Royal Advisor could have Talk skill secondary. Bouncer could have
punch skill and martial arts, etc. Being Monster Tactics though I'm not sure if you want a battle with a bunch of humans.